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Abstract
Forests are important components of agrarian environments and household livelihoods, but as broad political economies and agrarian environments change, how important is land control? Forest villagers in Java during Indonesia's New Order (1966–1998) were highly dependent on access to state forests for their livelihoods. In the teak forests, long reserved and enclosed lands were guarded closely by foresters in the State Forestry Corporation. Most villagers' income was locally earned and both land and forest dependent. By 2010, this highly localized and forest and agricultural land-dependent situation had changed dramatically. In Singget, a hamlet I studied in the mid-1980s, I found that nearly all local families derived some income from urban and distant industrial or rural work sites by 2010. Most hamlet residents, however, do not move away permanently to work, but migrate for periods of several months to several years. As in other parts of rural Java, these other sources of income are transforming household livelihood portfolios. Unlike many other parts of Java, the new practices affect villagers' relations to state forest and to their private agricultural lands. This essay examines these transformations in land control and labor dynamics, focusing on the changing importance of teak forest land to villagers' livelihoods over the last thirty-plus years.
Notes
For Javanese villagers in general, see Vickers (2004), Hugo (Citation2002), Kumar (Citation1979, Citation1980), Dove (1985), Pigeaud (Citation1962). Their work extends and supports earlier evidence provided by the colonial welfare survey (1930s) and the colonial land tenure survey (1880s).
At the time of the research and of writing the 1992 book, it would not have been prudent to identify the hamlet by name, nor to discuss its location or actual characteristics in print.
Neither the SFC or forest villagers comprise a homogenous group; rather I recognize them as environmental subjects with multiple and diverse interests, positioned differently in relation to the teak forests of Java.
Even though some forests were later defined as ‘parks’ or ‘conservation areas’, or ‘natural reserves’.
During the colonial period, some teak forests were allocated to private companies by concession for exploitation (Boomgaard Citation1994).
Teak was also enclosed by monopoly by colonial and contemporary states in Burma and Thailand (Vandergeest Citation1996, Bryant Citation1997).
A conversation with Dr. Charles Peters of the New York Botanical Garden in the mid-1990s.
In other work, I and others have written about the conflicts on these forest lands under colonialism, through the initial years of Indonesian independence, and throughout the New Order. In the next section I deal briefly with these historical conflicts and the terms under which villagers, foresters, and others have clashed or cooperated (see e.g. Peluso Citation1992, Sunderlin Citation1993, Santoso Citation2004, Simon Citation1999, Simon Citation2004, Awang Citation2004, Hoelman Citation2005).
I do not go into the problems or specific changes brought by the increased spread of social forestry, forest farmer users' groups, or ‘shared’ revenues, nor do I discuss the land occupations and agrarian reform efforts/demands on West Java's forest lands discussed by Noer Fauzi Rachman, also in this collection.
Unless otherwise noted, the material in this section is taken from Peluso (Citation1992).
The SFC's direct management thus differed from the Ministry of Forestry's indirect management of Indonesia's other production forest lands. These latter are allocated for logging to private concerns as territorial concessions. The SFC, in contrast, employs a veritable army of professionally trained foresters and manual laborers to carry out planning and implementation of all forestry activities on the lands under its authority.
Sponsored transmigration, a government program enabling poor Javanese villagers to seeklivelihoods on other Indonesian islands, was experienced in the teak forest as a punishment. The SFC had a special interest in the program, hoping to solve their ‘problems’ of what they saw as excess human populations and tree theft by moving people out of their forests in Java. Villagers, however, understood transmigration as banishment, a sentence imposed on recalcitrant and unrepentant teak ‘thieves’ who were caught and/or found themselves on the wrong side of the village leader. Even when a few transmigrants returned to Java and talked about their successes in West Kalimantan or Sumatra, few people were willing to sign up.
Another remnant of colonial policy in the present was the payment of village leaders' salaries with land rather than cash.
It was not illegal to sell the wood in your house. However, if you were selling your house, you needed more wood to build another. The acquisition of this wood was technically illegal, but proof was difficult unless thieves were caught in the act. See Peluso (Citation1992) for a more extensive discussion of Suharto era politics of house selling.
Singget was unusually less differentiated in terms of land distribution than other Javanese villages and even other hamlets of Bleboh. This was perhaps because of a more recent settlement history or its isolation.
An ‘honor’ it shares with Bangladesh.
Thus even more than the district's 44% average.
75% was in Age Classes 1–2 (Ardana Citation2008b).
Similar moves were made by Bupatis in Kalimantan and Sumatra. See Casson (Citation2001), McCarthy (Citation2001).
SFC Division Head Ir. Rijanto Tri Wahyono was quoted in the newspaper Pikiran Rakyat that some 10% of SFC employees, at all levels from labor foremen and guards to heads of Forest Districts and those in higher administrative positions have been involved in forest theft (Pikiran Rakyat, 13 Juli 2000; quoted in Faud and Astraatmaja 2000).
The policy was passed through Provincial Planning and Development Bureau Decree No. 1483/042.1/SPPU/Can/I on 25 November 2002. The decree stated that the reduction in the lifecycle (daur) of the teak trees was necessitated by the poor condition of the resources in the wake of the mass cutting. However, the possibility of reducing the trees' lifespan had been discussed in seminars in Yogyakarta in 1968 and 1985 (Aristyawati Citation2009), and had actually begun in some subdistricts' practice in late 1980s and 1990s. Since Undang-Undang Kehutanan 143/1974 they could legally harvest before 80 years; the more recent decree solidified the implementation.
As mentioned above, this is because standing stock lost to theft, which in the case of teak means losses of company assets, has never been accounted for as a ‘loss’ since the formation of the SFC in Sukarno's time, even though it was clearly counted as an asset by the colonial Dutch (Yuwono Citation2008).
While locals are lucky to make the equivalent of five to ten US dollars for digging out one of these stumps, they can be found in ‘bargain’ furniture stores in Northern California for over US $1000!
These findings are not completely conclusive as we were not able in the short research period to interview all or even most of the village adults.
We calculated this as follows: we counted a total 292 males in the village, and 261 females. We assumed that half the school-age or younger children – a total of 80 – were male, and half female. Some 84 of the men never worked outside – only 33% – while 136 women had never worked outside, which was 61%.
Calculated from the records of the 2004 agricultural census kept by the Hamlet Head.
While I was staying in the village in 2010, a dispute erupted over who had prior rights to a particularly desireable reforestation plot. The hamlet head, who was called by the forest labor foreman, declined to assist, saying he was afraid to interfere in the foresters' realm of authority. The ‘winner’ of the dispute in fact was a member of the LMDH from a different hamlet, who had evidently moved in on a plot cleared and claimed by a woman and her husband from Singget. The husband was away, and the wife was not able to prevail, nor did the hamlet head support her prior clearing rights, probably because he would have been uncomfortable with his fellow LMDH member. No one else from the LMDH was asked or volunteered to intervene.
Another change that requires further inquiry has to do with the long and short term composition of species on forest land. With so much land under reforestation, forest lands are producing more food crops such as dry rice, maize, cassava, sweet potato and other tubers, and even fruit trees and medicinal herbs. What this means for the future of forest production and the benefits of land control to the SFC is still not entirely clear.
Systematic study of gender differentiation for these forest labor tasks has not yet been done. Anecdotal evidence from both male and female activists supports this suggestion (among others, Diah Rahardjo, pers. comm, 2010).
